Broadcast on 31 May this year, Twitter exploded almost immediately in response to some of the most unwatchable scenes on television in many years. As the blogosphere and online communities followed not far behind in an eruption of public horror, it was clear that that the care of society's most vulnerable people had hit a watershed. My own blog posts on the subject and the comments of many both on my own site and countless others made me realise I wasn't alone in being unable to sleep that night and getting up out of bed to bash seven bells out of my laptop.

But the media bandwagon rolls on and even those most horrified by those scenes are once again tweeting about the X-Factor or the bedroom antics of Premiership footballers. Those of us who work in social care might suspect that the status quo has resumed. The sadists within our ranks have resumed their water-boarding, and the senior executives of companies providing care can once again get back to a nice round of golf. So what, if anything, has changed in 133 days?

As a social care training provider my colleagues and I meet hundreds of support staff from local authorities, charities and other care providers up and down the country, and strange as it may seem in the few months since that edition of Panorama I'm left with a glass which is, if not quite half full, is certainly far from empty.

Firstly, we can look to the already well publicised structural changes that have taken place. Both Castlebeck and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) have not just been caught with their trousers down, but suffered the acute embarrassment of being caught in a very intimate moment by an elderly relative popping round for a surprise visit. "Coo-ee, the door was open and… oh dear!"

But my recent experience of running training for care staff perhaps tells us more than the closure of poor quality homes and a rapid increase in CQC inspections. A public who once knew, saw or heard little about learning disabled people and assumed that it was still the NHS and local authorities providing for them now seems to have woken up to the fact that much of our social care system is now run at a very tidy profit by executives who think more of feeding a racehorse than meeting the needs of a young woman with autism.

Thanks to the Winterbourne View scandal and the subsequent demise of Southern Cross, we now seem now more capable of demanding the sort of excellent, small-scale services where individualised care is more than just an empty mission statement written on a dusty wall plaque. We might even argue that the average man or woman in the street is now much more aware that the care and support for their vulnerable relatives is worth a good deal more than a healthy bottom line, particularly when that comes at the price of shoddy management, poor staffing and a training culture which means little more than the annual fire lecture.

But no television documentary is ever going to completely rid social care of the occasional rotten apple who, through a combination of individual inadequacy and limp supervision, will quickly go on to sour the rest of the fruit bowl. But we can hope that in the aftermath of Winterbourne View we can all blow the whistle and perhaps get those who could and should have been listening to realise that Panorama wasn't just a one-off. We're all watching now.

The government's final report into the events at Winterbourne View hospital has been published. Here's what key figures in the sector think of the plans to improve care for people with learning disabilities